


Darcia

by Umbreon_ly



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: 5k - 10k range, All others are minor pairings, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Childhood Friends, Demon Oikawa Tooru, Dragon Rider Iwaizumi, Dragons, F/F, F/M, Final Haikyuu Quest, Growing Up Together, M/M, Magic, Mutual Pining, One-sided pining, Possessive Behavior, Slow Build, Smut tags to be added when the time comes, This leans more OiIwa than IwaOi, kind of, long chapters, maybe a little sinister and feral, occasional gore, which turns into
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 16:07:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21038969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbreon_ly/pseuds/Umbreon_ly
Summary: When he was very young Tooru crawled in through his window. There were horns growing out of his head, his fingertips were talons, the skin of his hands and feet impossibly black. He was crying.“Please don’t tell. Please don’t tell.”Outside, dragons and their knights hunted for the invading demon. But Tooru was his best friend, so Hajime never told. So a demon grew up among men in the kingdom of Aoba Johsai, protected and loved and powers growing ever unchecked. Until he did not need protection anymore. Until it seemed there was nothing that could be protected from him.(More concisely - child Iwachan thinks he can help his weird best friend live a normal life but he only grows more unmanageable; over time he sees that he cannot manage Demon King Oikawa)





	Darcia

**CH. 1: LUNA **

-

Some villages didn’t have names. Naomi Iwaizumi was born in one of these. When she was grown enough, she moved to another with a child in tow. She raised him in a barn.

Like all good mothers, she gave him food, warmth and love. There were children across the continent, in slimmer, sadder villages and in the beautiful brick homes in Shiratorizawa who lacked for these things. But not hers. They slept in a barn loft, so she taught him to count sheep and cows. They ate from a meager cookfire, so she pretended to be a grand chef when stirring her rabbit stew. She was slim and soft, so she pretended to have the strength of a bull so he would imitate her. He did. He also tried to eat dirt and rocks on occasion, but this was not the fault of the mother.

The child entertained and engaged himself: swung sticks around, rolled in hay, petted animals that did not belong to him. As many children in villages did, when there was no parental supervision in the vicinity, he roamed. He roamed in the dirt roads, around cornfields, and in the woods where no one lived.

In his first memory, Hajime roamed in the woods, not for the first time.

He was six years old and uneducated. He was made of natural and neutral colors: tan skin, hair dark as fertile soil and angular green eyes. His arms and shirt were scratched, his feet dirty. He was purposeful and careful.

He maneuvered purposefully and carefully over ridges and creeks like a panther, his second favorite animal of late. It was beautiful southern July where all things flowered. The forest was primarily deciduous with prominent maple and beech trees and brush growing in many spaces between. Willows were on the riverbends, poking into water and shading the minnows. Pink foxgloves and common white daisies flowered in sunny spaces, sometimes with their petals missing off their stems after Hajime took bites out of them.

There were dragonflies in the air. He hunted them. He stalked slow and quiet as a panther would, except when he fell forward or stepped on twigs and brush too loudly. The dragonflies paid no mind except for his hefty, slow lunges which they inevitably dodged, so that Hajime never caught any of them.

As the day went on and he pushed farther and farther into the wood, the dragonflies appeared less and less. He hunted minnows in the creek bed, but there was only one left and it swam swiftly away. He grumbled and stomped out of the water.

A twittering blue jay passed just over his head as he reached the shore. Nearby, a feather it had dropped landed in the grass. Shortly after it came a second bird, larger, so large that Hajime leapt to the ground with a cry of fright. He saw its shadow stream across the ground and over his outstretched arms. Above him flew a great grey owl that moved with huge, wide wing flaps, but there was no sound to match the motion. The only sound was Hajime’s gasp as he admired its mighty wings. It flew over him and away. And then there was no sound at all.

No birds, no breeze, nothing stirring the quiet creek or the leaves.

The boy didn’t dare move and push any sound into that silence. The fear to do so was wordless and instinctive. Even in the barn, there was often the content lowing of cows below him, or chickens softly clucking. Here in the sun and the glowing green there was suddenly nothing.

He turned his head slowly, watching for predators. For panthers and other things. But a long inspection of his surroundings showed nothing else amiss in the woods.

Hajime rose, scraping dirt lightly on his limbs, which seemed awfully loud just now. He stopped and checked again for panthers. Or bears. Naomi said bears only rarely came down from the low mountain, and not often in summer. No, summer was a good and friendly time, he thought. He’d made friends with a deer last summer, before it spooked and ran off. Hajime ran off, too, watching the trees. He watched the trees open before him to show a field all in sunlight.

Ahead, there was a long stretch of wild grass and azalea, long enough to run a race through before a thick crowd of trees started up again. A good place for crickets or mice or onion grass. Hajime heard a bird chirp once, far away, and then he didn’t.

Ahead in the grass there was something strange. Halfway across the field was a dark shape that had been still as a painting before but was now barely jostling. It adjusted itself in the grass like a cat in the sun. Too brightly colored to even be a deer fawn, too much white, but few other animals curled up in plain sight in such a way. Hajime stepped a bit closer to be sure. He had made three steps in that direction before the shape changed.

It was something amorphous and dark, and then he blinked. He saw a boy over there, in a white shirt with brown, fluffy hair. It wasn’t a child from the village that he knew. Hajime, undaunted, approached.

“Hi,” he said after a few more steps. “Are you playing here?”

The shape moved slightly back, floating through grass like a fish might through still water. The grass, too, became like water—the shape passing through it, making it unsolid. 

Hajime saw only the boy’s eyes, which were surely looking at him. The look of animal fear was something he knew and reacted quickly to. He stopped walking. And the boy stopped moving.

_‘Like horses,’ _Hajime thought. Horses were so easily spooked, even the brave and wild stallions. If the stranger was similar, he knew what to do.

“I’m Iwaizumi,” he said, giving his surname as Naomi said was proper. The boy was too far away to offer a handshake to. “I was playing around here. Are you from that other village, that’s south? Gaizo?”

_“No,” _came from the stranger’s direction. It was loud enough, but a little muffled.

Hajime felt the pause after. He tried to talk over it. “Mine is that way,” he pointed vaguely north. “I’m hunting dragonflies and stuff. I didn’t get one yet.”

“G-good,” the stranger said.

Both of them had pinched, strange expressions then, both sensing that he’d said something wrong. The stranger’s head lifted up a little and Hajime saw his eyes were brown, and now tearful.

He didn’t know what to say now so parroted something adult: “Are you feeling okay?” Then, when the boy started looking around, as though for a parent, he added with a small genuine touch, “Do you need help?”

Hajime started slowly walking his way, speaking gentle things as he went, as the village men would to approach a young horse. “If you got hurt, I can help you. I got an extra bandage for in case I fall and get bloody.”

“Don’t hurt me.”

Hajime’s reaction was a fully genuine flinch from confusion. “I won’t.”

“If you hurt me, I’ll cut you down.”

“Um, okay.”

Gentle speaking was making little progress so it quickly came to an end. Without words in the air, the only sound was Hajime’s soft and sure steps in the grass, slowly closing the distance between him in the stranger. The shape of him was no longer dark. Sunlit brown hair, a fancy white shirt with a collar like it was made by a tailor in the city, and smooth skin with no scratches on it, like he’d never walked through a wood in his life. Hajime crouched once he was very near. There was more than an arm length of space between them.

The boy was sitting mostly on one thigh with the other leg stretched out. Both hands were on the ground and pinching into the tousled grass with tense fists. His fussy expression implied there had been some upset, but he did not look hurt at all. He did not appear to notice a cricket that had decided to rest on his legs, which were all covered by pants instead of being mostly bare for summer weather.

When Hajime reached over for that cricket, the silence intensified. His ears popped. The boy’s eyes on him were huge. But he noticed almost nothing.

He had a mind only for the insignificant cricket. His fingers pinched over the insect’s hard little body and the boy jolted away from it. Hajime pulled his arm back and tossed it mightily away. The cricket did a few backflips before landing somewhere soundlessly. Shortly after, it chirped.

“Y-You _threw_ it,” the boy said with slow disbelief. 

“Bugs don’t care if you throw ‘em,” Hajime retorted, deadpan. “Other animals do, but not bugs. So are you hurt somewhere or not?”

“No!” he spat, and then licked his lips. He coughed a few times, too.

“Maybe you’re sick?”

“No! No. Fine.”

“If you’re fine, then what’s your problem? You acted like something was wrong. If nothing’s wrong, I’m going back to the creek.”

The boy’s hands slapped down onto the ground, stopping Hajime’s attempt to stand. He stared moodily back, wondering what he wanted. He was wide-eyed and worried. The franticness of it showed in his tight shoulders and his head, pushed forward in anticipation of something. It was not like a frightened child but like a dog, not wanting to be left alone outside. 

“Do you wanna…come with me?”

Silence.

Then, squeakily: “I, I can?”

“I mean, if you wanna. You gotta keep up, though. Okay?” There was a beat where it seemed the stranger did not understand or speak the language he was hearing. A little late, he said “okay” back, in the same upturned lilt in his voice like a question. This was lost on Hajime, already thinking of his dragonflies, which were his third favorite animal of late.

“You can help me catch some dragonflies. And the creek’s got some cool rocks in it.” The boy was paying attention now, so Hajime no longer felt the need to put on a forced calm as he might for a spooked horse.

He stood up and shoved a hand down towards the boy for him to grab. He did, slowly, by wrapping his hand around Hajime’s forearm instead of his hand. Hajime remembered from his mother that it was not polite to comment on folk’s strange behaviors, so he said nothing about it.

“Come on already, it’s right over there,” Hajime said.

“I can come with you?”

Now Hajime scowled, his patience quickly wearing down. “Yeah, I just said. Here.” He stopped by a pair of birch trees by the edge of the clearing. One of them had a fallen branch by the trunk, weakened and knocked down by some hawk or running squirrel that was too heavy. From this he tore off a smaller, thinner branch and ran his fist along the length, yanking little leaves off as it went.

He handed the mostly-bare switch to the boy. “Hold that. You can poke around bushes with it or move leaves. I’m gonna get some rocks.”

“Okay!”

“I forgot to ask what your name is,” he said, still scowling. And then waiting.

The boy swallowed. It made an audible noise like a heavy object hitting the ground. While Hajime made a confused face, the boy said, “Tooru.”

It wasn’t a name he’d heard before, so he parroted another phrase from his mother: “That’s a nice name,” and then moved on from the subject to matters of great import. “I’m gonna look over there, but I gotta use my hands. Let’s go.” He pivoted around, then started off towards the water without another word. Tooru stumbled after him with another shout of “okay!” He stayed a step behind the other boy as they walked.

The partnership of two boys wandering in the woods was a successful one. Hajime led the way between trees, bushes, stretches of empty grass and ground, and Tooru poked at things with his stick when ordered. He talked little and mostly shouted or whined. Their tension from before was mostly forgotten amid a dozen squeals and shouts as they played. 

Once, when Hajime picked up a spider to show his new friend, Tooru did not appreciate the gesture and smacked it away, screaming loud enough to scare the birds from a nearby tree. A hawk made a too-close dive at him and he cried. He fell on his rear end in a creek and he wailed. Hajime laughed at things like this, at least until he fell right in after him. While they sat on the shore drying off, they inspected rocks and threw them at each other. For a young friendship, nothing else was required.

At the end of the afternoon, Tooru’s strange shyness had begun to wear down and they were taking turns following each other through the trees. When it was Hajime’s turn he veered northward and Tooru followed in his footsteps like a duckling as he had done most of the day. When they were out of the trees and walking on flat grass, within sight of a cornfield, the lack of those energetic steps in his wake was suddenly audible.

“I can’t go there,” Tooru said from behind him. Above, a bird flew above and to their left side, sweeping over the cornfield and away from them.

“Thought you could stay for dinner,” Hajime explained. “I live that way. Can you come?”

“I can’t go where there’s people. It’s scary.”

“Why? I’m a ‘people’ and you’ve been with me all day.”

“You’re not people,” Tooru said, but he seemed to realize something was wrong with this claim. “You’re not the same. You’re fun. You like me.”

“Naomi will like you, too. Plus I’ve had kids over before. She’ll be fine with it.” There was a gap that ought to have been filled with a response, or even a refusal, or the hum of summer cicadas, but there was only quiet.

Hajime remembered horses. And at the same time, deer. His new friend moved and spoke like a little fawn following its mother. And he had long stupid legs like a foal. What could be done to soothe a creature with that unfortunate amount of nerves?

“I can show you my animals book,” he said unsurely. “I’m on the deer chapter. And my best rocks are at home.”

Tooru took a moment too long to respond. He made Hajime wait while he deliberated. He shuffled forward eventually, latching on to the back of Hajime’s shirt with his fists. His answer, too, was slow to come. “You…you like deer?”

It was an unexpected comment, so Hajime took a moment too long to reply. “Yeah. They’re cool. They have horns.”

Tooru smiled. “I like deer. They’re pretty. And tasty.”

“Yeah, venison’s actually for dinner tonight. Mr. Yura’s letting us use the kitchens in his house while he’s gone.”

“What’s a kitchens?”

Hajime just dragged him along.

The small and sweaty hands clung to his shirt past Mr. Norai’s cornfield and across the empty, dirt-packed road. They had to separate briefly to jump over a log in a copse of trees, but the hands sought purchase again on his back again as soon as they were able. They stayed in place when they approached a cottage with smoke puffing out its chimney. They stayed in place when they passed that homestead to approach the red barn behind it.

“You live here?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s safe? It’s fine?”

“It’s fine. Promise.”

One of the tall barn doors was open, showing empty space inside, as the cows were still out to pasture. There were long shadows everywhere around them, madly stretched by the sun setting behind the trees. Inside the barn, lamplight from the floor and from the loft leaked out. Naomi was standing outside, setting tools into a bucket. She was backlit by a warm yellow glow when she waved to her son and the stranger he’d brought with him.

When they were very close, Tooru’s hands slid away from where they had punctured his shirt and found his hand instead. He tightened their joined fingers.

They stopped before the open door. “Naomi, this is Tooru, can he stay for dinner, please?” Tooru stood so closely behind him that he was without doubt using him to hide. He trembled like a fawn, as though Naomi were some dangerous predator. Her smile was only welcoming and sweet.

“You’re Tooru? That’s such a nice name,” she told him.

At this familiar phrase, softer than her son had said it the first time, the trembling slowed. “No need to be scared, honey. If my son beat you up, I’ll smack him upside the head and he can sleep with the chickens!” Tooru heard the playfulness in her tone and suppressed a shy smile at her. Naomi said she was about to go to the house to start cooking.

Hajime yanked on their joined hands. “Let’s go. You can see my comet rock.”

They ran past Naomi’s legs, from grass to wooden floorboards and hay bales. Naomi continued to gather her cooking materials in the bucket. She left the children to their own devices. 

After Tooru was prodded up the ladder, he sat in a barn loft for the first time. Hajime went to the corner to fetch a shabby wooden box. Tooru was only a step behind him and the box jabbed into his arm. With teamwork they barely managed to avoid dropping it. 

They sat by the mattress while Hajime ceremonially removed the lid and set it aside. Within were his very best rocks, river rocks, ones dug out from dirt and one bearing a tiny tooth mark. But mostly they all looked like the same bland rocks repeated several times. Tooru pointed this out and received a slap for his audacity. He fell to his side on the floorboards, curled up and defending his face from angry blows, but giggling.

Outside, the shadows grew longer from the quiet wood where birds and beasts did not stir. There was a full moon the day they met.

-

The seasons turned and men stayed the same, but children grew. Hajime grew taller and stronger, strong enough to lift a whole calf, almost. Tooru grew as well. He definitely grew louder.

There were punctures in all his shirts now from Tooru’s grabbing hands. Mostly they were from more attempts to hide and be shielded. He hid behind his friend’s back when he was introduced to two village children and Hajime said his name for him.

_“That’s a stupid name,_” the other boy said, and tried to kick him. Tooru hid while Hajime jabbed the boy with a stick, and then they all went to the creek together to play sea battle. Hajime pretended to be a shark, which were his sixth favorite animal.

When Tooru was not there, Hajime went into the woods alone, or played with rocks alone, or went to another farm in town. He knew the times of year spare farmhands were needed. He would approach the farming men, stand up straight, and offer them his help. Mrs. Doreah wouldn’t answer the door when he knocked, but usually Mr. Norai did, and he didn’t mind assistance at his farm. So Hajime gained the power to nudge, push, and then lift that year’s lambs and cow calves. He snipped at the sheep’s wool with shears. He fed the small, unweaned lambs that suckled on his fingers. Once Tooru came with him and the lamb bit his finger and waddled away screeching. Tooru laughed.

Time was marked not by dates but by play and pleasure, and indifference to all parts of the world that didn’t concern them. 

It was October when Tooru stood on a rock by Mr. Siba’s cornfield and proclaimed he was the king of it, but Hajime shoved him off so he was not the king anymore. Tooru came close to landing on his feet but missed. He fell anyway, limbs flailing and then bashing the ground.

“Mean Iwa-chan!” cried a disembodied voice from the other side of the rock, but Mean Iwa-chan was already stomping away.

“Iwa-chan, watch this!” he said once, throwing a toy in the air that then bashed him in the face. He didn’t cry that time, but did after the second time. It had hit them both in the face multiple times by the end of that day.

“Iwa-chan, you’re stupid. Your brain’s full of dirt because you eat dirt!” he taunted once, and then skittered away when Hajime shrieked that he swore he wouldn’t tell anyone about that.

“Iwa-chan, look at me!” Tooru gasped once, when one of the horses on the Doreah farm was sniffing his hand. Hajime and the Doreah children all watched as it ate a cut apple out of his palm, a drastic change from rearing up and kicking its forelegs at him the previous week. Tooru bragged about this and all subsequent horse feedings to anyone who would listen for the rest of the season.

Once, Tooru said nothing, but fell out of a tree with a shrieking sound that stilled Hajime completely. It was too loud a sound, too close. Like the sound of his pain had been shrieked just next to his ear. Without reason, he believed in that moment it wasn’t made by a boy but a creature that had hurt him. A panther. Hajime gritted his teeth, bit his tongue, and bolted. Tooru was alone and unmolested by any predators, but he was curled up in pain by the tree he’d fallen out of.

Hajime dropped to his knees and imitated a movement he had seen from Naomi: he massaged his hands over the stretch of his bruised side where Tooru’s fists were gathered over the pain. He pushed the other boy’s hands away with each motion, till only his own hands soothed the hurt spots. Tooru lay still, arms limp now, and watched him. I am all right, he said in a strange way, but Hajime was frantic and angry now for not having seen him fall, so he called him stupid and kept his hands there for a bit longer.

Within the hour, Tooru was well enough again to jump on his friend’s back and demand that he wrestle him or carry him home or both, or else he’d bite his ear off.

Tooru was his best friend by the end of that year and into all future ones.

-

At the end of summer, a bear came down from the low mountain. Hajime was home alone, sitting just below the circular window in the loft, and he saw it.

It was his third-favorite animal—no, fourth, his fourth animal. It was an incredible sight, a mighty animal, but strangely colored. It wasn’t just a dark earthy brown like brown bears out to be. Its side was streaked with naked pink and bleeding red. Tiny winks of bones showed through. 

Even from his high window, Hajime could see the exposed muscles. It wore stripes of opened flesh on one side as though the claws of something even bigger and mightier had torn it open. Something mightier had attacked it and turned it to gore. Hajime held on to the windowsill to stay standing up. Dead animals or skinned animals or deer downed by mountain lions were not usually gored animals, but this one was. He only knew that the wound was brutal, and he wanted to recoil.

The bear was pressing on against exhaustion and pain. It made for the road past the barn and Mr. Yura’s house and kept walking. It walked as though it were a man, following a path. Past the horizon there would be buildings: the square, where the village had six entire buildings that were all standing close together, including the inn. Including Naomi.

Panthers stalked and struck without mercy. Mountain lions would go for the neck to rip open the throat of prey. Bears destroyed men completely, even hunters, even soldiers. He was too young to name the fear of death, but he felt it.

The fear of death ate his words and thoughts, so he had none to react with. His limbs moved by themselves, reaching out for escape or help, but there was none there. His head bonked against a wall and it hurt. This helped. Hajime spent a long time trying to stand. There was only action left to him. He felt it.

He got halfway down the ladder before falling and missing all the hay bales. The impact was soft, hardly painful, with dread numbing his limbs so, but he persevered, growling. He scrambled up to the barn doors. They were locked as Naomi said they must be when he was here alone. To a mostly mindless child, they were not a shield from wind, weather and thieves but an obstacle. He unlocked them, left them open, and ran to stop the bear.

“Don’t hurt my mom or else! Stop it now!” he shouted to the empty road.

There was no one in sight to stop him or help him. There was no bear in sight to rip his head off his shoulders. Hajime kept running and yelling.

His crazy shouting was cut to a high-pitched yelp when his bare feet stepped in the animal’s warm blood in the road. His own terror was blatant then, even to him. Nausea bloated up within. The war cries ceased. The square came into view and he was struggling not to cry.

His run slowed to a lame jog as the buildings came into view: the Doreah family home first, the cobbler next to it, the inn that was square with many, many windows and two stories tall. Between the inn and the cobbler’s building there was a crowd gathering. The tall shapes of men leaned and pushed heartily against each other. Their laughter stayed Hajime’s tears, but not the stuttering of his heartbeat.

“Naomi,” he gasped as he came close. The bear was on the ground, men with crossbow bolts surrounding it. Some women, one merchant with bright red clothes, then his mother. “Naomi, are you okay?”

Mr. Norai the farmer was standing with his arm over her shoulder while she leaned into him. She wore her finest dress, blue and lined with white, with a glimmering white comb holding up her hair. She was laughing, up until she saw Hajime running up the road. Naomi tore out from under the man’s arm to meet him. She bolted not like a panther, but a bull. 

“Hajime,” she gasped when he fell face-first into her. She grunted at the effort of lifting him off the ground. Hajime’s legs curled up a little on instinct. He pressed his head against her shoulder, staying still, like a panther cub held by its scruff. Safe now, with her.

“What’s wrong, what are you—did that bear—” She all but threw him down onto the ground and began squeezing and pulling at him, inspecting his body for scars. Thankfully the child was just as she’d left him, perhaps dirtier. “My god, you made me think that thing had your blood on it, what, what happened?”

“I saw it coming to the square, I saw from the window,” he gasped. He tried to bare his teeth but nothing happened. Too weak. He kept gasping. “If it tried to get you, I was gonna fight it—”

“Like _fuck _you would!”

“L-like what?”

Her hand whirled back and slapped him. Hajime was silenced but the sound echoed. It caught the attention of men who had been standing near the bear. “For god’s sake, Hajime, do not chase bears! Ever! You could have died! If it’s dangerous for men with crossbows, it’s dangerous for you, too, do you get me?”

“Hey, Naomi, be easy on the kid!” called Genji the carpenter. “I seen Hajime wrestle my nephew once, I bet he could take on a brown bear real good. Body slam that beast, right?”

The slap still stung and tears were welling up strongly at the corners of his eyes, but Hajime still blushed under the sting. He shuffled in place. Mr. Norai stood nearby all that time, and only then did Hajime notice him. The glare the man was giving him down his upturned nose made him jolt in surprise.

“He was just scared and wanted his ma,” Mr. Norai said. That was true and it stung not just on the boy’s wounded cheek, but all over.

With two men looking at him now, he shuffled a bit away from his mother. She noticed and dropped her hand away from him. Mr. Norai added, “He know about the sweep tonight or not?”

Hajime kept silent, thinking it wise, while Naomi stumbled. “I, I forgot completely. It was busy last night,” she said. She flipped back and forth between her son and the group of men who were now tying ropes to the dead bear’s feet. Its blood was leaking into the dirt now. “Hajime, I’m so sorry, but you have to go home and stay inside. I forgot to let you know last night.”

“I can sweep if there’s not enough men,” Hajime offered quickly. One of the Doreah sons inspecting the creature’s wounds paused to look up and chuckle at him. 

"It's not something you volunteer for, dear," Naomi told him, but she was so charmed that she started to laugh. "But thank you." 

"If we _could _volunteer for sweeps, I know Hajime would be rushing to it," Genji praised again, and Hajime blushed again. 

“That thing was almost killed by bandits with stolen weapons, is what happened,” spat Mrs. Doreah. The other adults' eyes all darted to her immediately. She was standing in her doorway of the cobbler’s place, just above the group handling the bear. “That's why that wound is so hideous, so large. There’s men hiding out on the mountain, come up from Nekoma or somewhere and they stole a gem. Trying to use it to kill. I know it. The sooner they’re swept out, the better.”

Naomi turned back and met his eyes again. "A sweep means there's danger around," she told to her son, who absorbed this with widened eyes. "And there's important men come from the capital to deal with it, or look for the bad men. We all stay inside while the knights pass through. You stay inside and out of their way until the next morning." Her hand was on his head and she ran it lovingly through his dark, familiar hair. It soothed her; her son was caught between feeling calm and feeling embarrassment in front of Genji. "We had one here when you were really little, when there was a bad thief near Gaizo." Hajime half-listened to her, watching the group of men casually leaning on the bear's dead and conquered body. 

Naomi clapped both hands lightly on his ears and startled him. “You’ll have to go inside early tonight, okay? I might have to stay at the inn tonight, so you lock the doors till morning no matter what. I know you can light the fire for supper. Take a bath tonight, too. By yourself, not with a chicken.”

“Tooru made me do that,” Hajime grumbled back. But he promised he would do as bid. She nudged him in the direction of home and he obediently went. No one watched him go, busy with moving the bear and shuttering windows.

The walk home was different than the sprint into town. It was eerie to be empty of that intense nausea and desperation, only the absence of it marking the fact that it had all happened. He hadn’t seen Genji and the Doreah sons shoot the bear, nor heard the screams of those who saw it running towards them, but his heart had been the last one to stop pounding. No one in the square had faced a bear the way he had, by running towards it with nothing. And now he was sent home like his brave charge mattered not at all, and the villagers were dealing with the thing’s corpse with calm and ease because they were strong men and brave, experienced hunters, which he did long to be.

This tangle of emotions and lack of them was all too much for him, so he stopped on the way home to lay on his belly in the grass and let it all drain. He grumbled at the grass. Stared at it. Ate a mouthful of it. There were bits of dirt at the bottoms of the thicker blades, but no one saw him eating it.

Inside the barn, Mr. Yura had already rounded up the cows and put them inside. The Yuras’ house had all closed doors as well. Lamplight was shining through two of their windows. Hajime closed the doors, locked them, and went to sit by the cows. They did not look bothered at all by this business of a mutilated bear coming to town or being locked up for the night at least an hour early.

How pleasant it must be, to be a cow and not be bothered by anything. Hajime did not remember where on his animal list cows ranked. He remembered having trouble reading a lot of the words on the cow section of his animal book. He whispered to two of his favorite ones that he’d eaten some grass earlier and almost fought a bear.

Night fell with the peaceful chirping of crickets outside, and cows lightly grunting and rustling the hay inside. He listened to them as usual. Then he listened to rain.

-

Help, help, cried a stranger in a nightmare. Outside, there was a crash of lightning that shook the entire barn. Hajime woke up shrieking.

Below the cows were shoving into one another and the chickens were running in circles in their coop nearby. All their panic was soundless; all the sound in the world was the thunder, still roaring.

Hajime was off the mattress. He had scrambled to opposite side of the loft, his back against the wall and hands uselessly clamped over his ears. From here most of the whirling, howling animals on the floor below were in view, but he perceived them only as colored blurs, painted white from the lightning flash still coming through the windowpanes. 

The barn shook again, not from its foundations but against one wall as though struck by a hammer. The impact was on the west wall, where the loft sat. It shoved Hajime to the side and almost made him topple over. _‘A panther,’ _he thought at first, but in his wordless animal fear, he knew better. He knew to look at the window. 

In the loft window there was a shape pressed against the glass. Hajime did not breathe.

It had a torso and arms. A head with horns upon it. Hands like a man. The hands were moving. It said something. He knew it, heard nothing. Comprehended nothing.

The thunder came a second time, loud but not deafening. The sound of pattering rain was audible again. The long, desperate moan of a cow came through. Hajime comprehended not this, but a shape: the shape outside was terrible and familiar. It was an outline he would know if only he had rein of his own mind. But if it was familiar, it may not kill him. It could surely kill him, he would soil himself soon, if it moved.

_Aa—ohh—ahh—chh. _

This sound was not spoken, but known. Hajime more certainly than he knew his name and body that the thing had _said, _had communicated. He knew it was not something that looked like Tooru, his friend, but it was truly him in the flesh clinging to the edge of the loft window two stories above the ground in the rain. It _was_—

It spoke: _Aa—! Aan! I—_

_—Wa—ahn_

_—I—w—a—_

_Ahn—_

_Iwa-chan, _it pleaded finally, and with that Hajime was dragged into the sea hard as a dropped anchor, now comprehending. He _comprehended_: _H—e—l—p_

Below all the animals were screaming. Hajime’s eyes were made to glow green in the flash of lightning. In the electric glare made by Tooru’s eyes. He could not look him directly in the eye, but he could get up off his knees. He could crawl. He could see the shape of Tooru’s hand on the windowpane. It was too large, or shaped wrong. It was all black as though stained by soot or tar.

Tooru cried out now, his fear singing into the other child so he could feel it. It was an animal sound. During the sound came a voice layered atop it, communicating: “Let me in.”

_‘Bear,’ _Hajime thought nonsensically. He seemed to float. In his mind, on the floorboards. This is what it would have felt like to truly face the bear.

“Iwa-chan, please!”

Hajime rose. He went forward to the right side of the circular window. Tooru’s lively hair was pressed down by wind and water. This observation was too close to his eyes, so his head swung away from the sight. He focused on the windowpane; the circle was divided into two half-moon shapes that opened independently. Hajime’s sweating hands worked to undo the lack on the right, where only Tooru’s hand and none of his weight rested.

The creature’s fear was singing into him even louder from here. His body was too small to hold it. He could have burst and spread across the walls. He could have jumped from the loft and hid. Died. Hajime shoved the half-moon outward.

Rain tore in immediately. His face was soaked before he breathed in. All his and Naomi’s possessions were blown inward or to the barn floor below. Hajime was hyperventilating where he stood. He stood where he was to keep the pane from closing, opening the way for the creature. It crept from the left pane to come clo—

—ser.

For the length of one breath the sounds of all the shrieking animals came back—disappeared again. For one breath its hand lifted up and the rain lifted up with it: a shield that deflected the water.

Then it placed both clawed hands on the windowsill and pulled itself into the barn. It fell forward and crashed onto the floor and the invisible wall disappeared, slamming Hajime and the floor with rainwater again. He leaped back and the window slammed shut, shaking in its place in the wall. Hajime fell down, too. Terror bid him to turn around, to move, but it wasn’t strong enough. There was a stronger force, from outside.

Outside there was a roar deeper than the natural crash of thunder. There came a silent spray of lightning that showed the silhouette of wings wide as the barn itself. Outside there was a dragon.

_‘First animal,’ _Hajime thought, not understanding even himself. This, too, was a shape he knew well, from books and stories and dreams. In his animal book. The shape disappeared with the lightning, as did the roar. But the sight of it had frozen all his prey-like dread and pulsing adrenaline. He knew to use it for something, for Tooru.

He turned around, slowly. Laying on one thigh, two hands braced on the floor to keep him up. He chose to say, “What’s wrong with you?”

His friend did not admit what was wrong with him. He tried to gather himself to sit up as Hajime was. It gave ample time for him to be scrutinized: the hands that were strangely shaped because they were a bit too long, because their ends were not fingertips but pointed talons. One was pure black with no texture or shadows to distinguish it, like pure ink. The other only had three black fingers, with the inky color extending partway up his wrist and his usual pale peach skin color coexisting unpleasantly next to it. Through a tear in his deep blue shirt was something moving akin to vines. Hajime did not see this.

He saw that on his friend’s bowed head were a pair of horns growing out from just above the ears. They were not perfectly smooth but ridged, like a ram’s, growing slightly out from the head before pointing up. They were dark in color, charcoal-black or a dark brown, but there was not enough moonlight now to tell. The eyes were bright. He was crying.

His crying and the rainwater dripping onto the floorboards was the only sound. The sweep occurring outside was shut out. Below, the animal’s panic was inaudible underneath bubble-like cages that had not existed seconds before. 

“Please.” Hajime heard it as though it was spoken against his ear. “Please don’t tell.”

“What?” he said mindlessly back. Tell what? What _Tooru_, what nightmare, what sound?

_Please—pl-e—e—a—s—e._

Now they ceased to hear the sound of water, although it continued to drip from them. They only heard Hajime’s breath.

“Are you a...a dragon?”

“No.”

No sound.

_That’s such a nice name.’ _Naomi had said. _Tooru_ was a nice name. It wasn’t a monster name. Why did he think this? Even now?

Tooru was not moving at all. He seemed to not be alive at all, like he was painted on the floor of the loft and not breathing there. Still as a fawn in the woods, as he’d been found.

Hajime was too young to make this decision, and yet it was his alone. He made it quietly. 

“Do you…need help?”

At this Tooru raised his head. His gaze naturally drew the eye; Hajime finally held his breath and looked in those eyes. He was forced to see that there were things moving within them, within that lively brown. There was dark, long space and shapes inside that went back much farther than the back of his skull.

Tooru communicated: _Yes _

_I’m--scared _

Hajime was shaking again. In the eyes he saw a long black fall, a huge distance specked with tiny islands like stars or gems. He hissed, “You didn’t tell me you’re a…a—”

_A demon, _his mind supplied for him. Adults said that word as a curse. It was in books and he'd surely spoken it aloud at some point in his tiny life. He knew what that was now. 

The demon child only cried. He crept a bit closer to his human friend, weakly stifling his own keening. Below, the shield holding in the sound of the animals flickered weakly. Tooru didn’t try to speak aloud, but communicated instead. He sang fear and hurt that reached into Hajime’s tongue and teeth. He sang a picture of a wispy blue-green mist like a magic-made aurora moving through trees. He sang a feeling of hiding alone in the brush, among mountains and hills, at night.

Hajime comprehended from it: _I am kin _

_Kin_, sounded in Hajime’s head. It meant nothing to him. 

“Tooru. I can hide you. The dragon didn’t see you come in, right? I can hide you and he’ll never know.”

The demon nearly broke upon hearing this. He knew salvation. “Iwa-chaaaan,” was all he could muster, through a humanlike sob.

The sound of it made Hajime jerk in surprise. After that spell in his head, only a few seconds long, the sound of his name spoken aloud felt foreign. It felt as though he’d never heard it before. It felt like he did not remember it. And he truly did not remember it. Hajime did not remember why this playful name had come to be, or when. He did not remember where Tooru lived.

“You hid things from me,” Hajime said. A hard press of rain on the window sounded with his words.

Tooru only said, “Yes,” from below him, and it sounded so near Hajime’s ear.

"Did you...did you attack that bear? Earlier today?" 

Tooru whined, "I, I was, I'm--"

Hajime cut him off abruptly, instinctively, not wanting to hear. “Can you hide your horns again? Can you hide…what’s coming out of you?”

_S—C—AR—ED. H—ELP _

Hajime grabbed his friend’s shoulders, pinching his fingers in as Tooru had done so many times to him. “You need to calm down and hide it all again! Hide it or I’ll throw you down the ladder and break your legs!”

A sensation from behind cut away his brash shouts. Something like pressure, something like Tooru’s soundless singing but larger. Without doubt, without hearing it, they knew something was outside. 

“Get down,” Hajime hissed. Tooru held on to him.

Hajime grabbed the collar of his friend’s shirt, where a panther would grab at its cub’s scruff, and pulled him violently away. He dropped him on a mattress, kicked him, pushed him to the wall. Tooru made no sound when Hajime dropped his own body atop his. Hajime covered him with the blanket, shoving the corners around to hide every last bit of him, and forced himself up onto one elbow. From here he could easily look up and out the window. He could look like a boy suddenly awoken from innocent sleep by something strange. It still rained outside, tentative and quiet.

They waited. Under a little layer of cotton, Tooru had both arms crushed around his belly in a vice grip. They—waited.

A white shape passed in view of the window. It was far up in the sky, a dozen houses high or more. From that distance, its pure white coloring was stark on dark clouds. The body was longer than a house, the wings could easily span the barn. They made one slow flap: not soundless like an owl, but still quiet. The forelimbs were tucked close to the body as it flew. There were smooth horns on the head and fin-like spines along the neck and back. It was smooth and lovely. Something that could be from the moon.

The head swiveled slightly downward to observe the land below it. It observed the Yuras’ barn. Hajime comprehended this more clearly than he had comprehended Tooru’s language from before.

The white dragon passed out of the view. Hajime stayed still. He dared not speak. He was still, careful. Only a panther cub before a dragon.

A short brush of wind—a flap of the wings—and it came back. It passed so close that the wing was curving over the roof of the barn, rattling the tiles.

The head alone was the size of the whole loft. The eye was wintry blue, crystalline in its iris. The pupil was only a slit in a crush of ice, moving and watching a little boy through the window. He was captured in that eye. It stole his breath. It was mightier and more beautiful than any animal under the sun. The whole of it passed by his window, floating on as though there was no need of the wings at all. All white, silver, blue. A moon all its own.

After the second pass, he waited for a third, but it never came by a third time. Ecstasy had overcome little Hajime and blinded him completely to the fact that two men rode between the dragon’s shoulders, just ahead of the wing joints. The dark spot of the harness and their outfits were visible when the dragon was flying away. One of those men was shouting.

“No sighting! Luna, let’s head east!”

_‘Luna, you’re heading east?’ _Hajime thought back. He leaned towards the window, panting. 

The white dragon banked left in the sky, stark against dark clouds. The jaws opened, showing a dark mouth and tongue, but there was no noise. No roar like thunder, like before.

They waited till it was out of sight. There was still a light rain, and one complaining cow. No other sounds.

“I think she’s gone now,” Hajime whispered. Underneath him there was no movement. So he moved instead, trying to move within the grip of Tooru’s arms till he loosed one and then the other. He flipped the blanket away and saw a head of brown hair, where there were no horns. He patted around the hair, just in case, but there were none.

“You’re hiding them again?” After a quiet pause he realized he knew the answer. “The animals calmed down.”

“Thank you,” Tooru whispered. There were tear tracks on his cheeks. “Thank you. Iwa-chan. Hajime.”

_Iwa-chan _is what Tooru said because he couldn’t pronounce his name at first and it had stuck. He knew this now. He had hidden this because he had never had a little human friend before and was scared. He had hidden from Hajime’s mind, and from any villager who might think to question, the thought of where he went home to each day. He had hidden from men before. He was not a person, though he could look like one. He could kill a person. 

Tooru crumpled inward with new distress when he saw Hajime’s eyes welling with tears. He reached over to sweep them away. Both of them swept at them a bit more till they were gone, till Hajime was sitting fully up and scowling. He fisted his hands, trying to gather himself. In his nameless village there were good and brave and strong men, and he wanted to be like them. Right now he was greater than any of them.

He sniffed and rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. Then he was steady. “You’re my friend and I’ll help hide you,” he said. It was all he could think to say, after this.

“Thank you,” Tooru said. 

For a while, they waited and only breathed. They were alone in the loft, in moonlight and rain.

Eventually, Tooru broke eye contact. He submissively bowed his head and whispered, "I’ll be good for you, Iwa-chan, I promise." He inched a little closer to him on the mattress till their shoulders and heads were pressed together, and his hand held onto Hajime's arm. 

“If you get better at hiding, they won’t find you, right? You gotta get better.” 

“Yes, Iwa-chan.”

He paused, thinking of the white dragon again. How splendid that beast was, while he hid a demon behind his back. It hadn't seen or suspected anything and flown away like there was no danger at all. Did Tooru even know that dragons were his favorite animal? He did not remember. Maybe that was hidden too. He shoved this thought away, then pushed his shoulder lightly against his friend's. “You’ll have to practice and get better at it. You can find good ways to use your, your magic and things. And then no dragons will get you. And I’ll help you. It'll be okay.”

Tooru listened attentively, but with that, Hajime’s generous thoughts seemed to have been emptied. The two boys were staring at each other, feeling their exhaustion. Tooru watched Hajime’s eyes as a hawk watched a mouse, searching for regret or distaste, but there was none. He was only tired.

Tooru lay down when Hajime did. He still lay between Hajime and the wall, protected as before. He’d been given more space than when Hajime had been nearly laying on top of him, but he inched closer anyway, making them tight again. Hajime accepted one arm slung over him and wrapped tight round his middle.

“Night.”

There was no verbal reply. Tooru squeezed his arms around the boy that saved and sheltered him. He inhaled the scent of him slowly; it had had become familiar long ago. Tooru made a light keening noise into the skin of his shoulder. Hajime could not call back to him in his tongue, but he pushed lightly back to acknowledge him. To him, it said _it's okay. _Across all things, he said,_You’re welcome, for saving you from execution, I did it for you. _

Tooru understood. He nuzzled against him more. His tongue slipped through his lips and lapped at Hajime’s exposed shoulder blade. His tongue was smooth, then rough, then smooth. He licked like a cub would. _Tha—nk Y—o—u, T—h—a—_

Hajime felt the little catlike affection from that rough tongue and limply accepted it. It was not strange or even noteworthy now. He had no adult, capable mind to attempt to process the befriending of a demon, but he could comprehend Tooru, his friend already, who needed help and was grateful now. Things were all right now. 

Tooru gave one final, longer lick before finally settling down into the mattress, keeping close to his friend and savior still. They stayed close throughout the night.

Hours passed where the demon was asleep and safe.

In the late morning, Naomi finally returned, already refreshed and ready for the day. She found her child and his friend curled up together on her mattress. Little Tooru must have come over from Gaizo last night despite the curfew demanded by the sweep, she thought with some worry. To be out during a sweep, when there were dragons flying about. Did his parents know he’d come here, she wondered?

A moment later, she didn’t wonder. She left them alone in the loft and left to attend to some business elsewhere. The children continued to sleep.

Outdoors, birds were chirping.

-

Chapter 1 done, stage is set for a "growing up together in fantasy au with a couple awesome dragons, couple other demons lurking around, some journeying and friendship and stuff" plot. Thank you for reading. I worked really hard on this.

This one chapter took several MONTHS and almost 40k words' worth of scrapped drafts that felt too choppy, too unfocused, too shitty, etc. One began with the Iwa family moving to Aoba Johsai immediately, one had Tooru's reveal take much longer, one where dragons had way more/too much focus (this was a Temeraire AU at first). This draft has the best flow/vibe/narrative ~mouthfeel~ of the lot. And I'm so goddamn tired of stagnating on this one thing and want to progress on. 

So Hajime is now committed to helping a demon at age 7. Or imagine him at 8 if you want. I love IwaOi fanon that they've been around each other since basically birth but it was hard to find a medium between them knowing each other since ever, Iwa learning and deciding to hide Oi's secret at a very young age, while also making them old enough to have meaningful interactions. Now they'll grow up together (they will be a knight and a mage) while Tooru's nature as a demon becomes less cute and friendly as he ages. 

Things I meant to accomplish with my litter-ary writingwurds this chap: portraying a new friendship between two young boys with hints to the reader that something is off (ex., animals avoid or fear Tooru unless he puts his magic on airplane mode). Grow the friendship naturally but not too slowly as idk how long I can keep seriously keep readers’ attention on 6- or 7-year-olds. Reveal Tooru’s nature as a demon in an abrupt, frightening manner when he needs shelter from knights + dragons hunting him. Omnicient-ish POV to portray details that Iwa or Tooru may not know or see.

(PS A panther is not an actual species; it can refer to any individual of the _panthera _species that is black/melanistic. A black leopard can be called a panther, or a black jaguar or even a black mountain lion. I didn't know this till the end of high school Iwa probably doesn't know this because he is 7 and skimmed that part of his animal book or can't read that well and I just really enjoy associating him with black panthers, thank you.) 

Thanks for reading.


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